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Marketing for Idiots

I don’t like marketing phrases trying to pull my leg even before I know what the offer is about. Recently, I received an email from my German mobile phone provider, it starts (translated from German):

You have to grab this chance!

… and I stopped reading and immediately deleted the email. Do they think they can talk me into a buying decision with an initial aggressive sentence?

I get the same feeling of being treated like an idiot after reading lots of information hardly finding the price of the offer, nor being able to make a choice. Try out Microsoft SharePoint Web site – how long will it take you to find a price tag? How much longer will it take until you got an idea which of the SharePoint product variants might be the right one for you?

Some products might need more explanation than others, but in the end, all a customer wants to know is: What do I get for which price?

Assuming that higher intelligence leads to higher income/revenue, why are those with a good spending power much too often being treated like idiots by marketing? Customers mature just like markets mature, urging marketing to catch up, make potential customers feel intelligent and acknowledge that they can decide for themselves.

3 thoughts on “Marketing for Idiots”

For me I hardly can’t believe that those kind of marketing work on any other persons like Homer Simpson. And that guy isn’t even real. So far the headline is misleading: It’s more “marketing by dummies” There are still to much out of them.